What is Considered Advert in this Forum

[Merlion]

I find it confusing about what is consider advert in this Forum and has to be removed. It is good to clear the air and have some common understanding.

We are artists. Most of us sell our artworks. Many of us have websites showing our works with intention to sell. Some display price and mention how to order. When we mention and show our artworks and our websites in this Forum, it is generally for exchange of ideas and experience among our peers. It can be considered as a sort of advertisement, but apparently this is considered to be acceptable. This is understandable.

When we go beyond this, perhaps the issue is becoming less clear. For instance, some of us also provide services to other artists, like running a bronze foundry, or doing art design. This is a business. When we mention these, I suppose this would be considered acceptable if we are artists providing art related services. But some of us employ assistants, becoming a business with employees. Apparently the issue is less clear. So the moderators have to make their personal judgement.

In the past, the mods have frequently not taken action when the services provided are unusual, especially new technology. The mention of these are clearly advert to promote the business. But Forum members can learn from these special techniques so the mods have very often kept quiet.

There are other cases getting more complex. I'll continue in the next post. What is clear is that personal judgement by the mods are necessary, but criteria are not spelt out leading to unhappiness.

Do give your comments.

[Tandigon]

Hello Merlion

I agree about the vagueness and appreciate that the moderators see clear solicitation as a sales advert. Thus it may be better to include a seperate forum for goods or services relevant to our pursuits. These forums could require the one offering the product to offer comprehensive explanations about various aspects and applicability.

For example, I have some experience in rotational casting technique. There was one vendor who did put in a thread and I asked for more explanation but was greeted by silence. Neither is their website very helpful.

Tandigon

[Merlion]

As I was saying at the last post, it is good to have some common understanding about advert in this Forum. By the way, I have no vested interest in any advert. And I have no axe to grind against any mods here.

When we go beyond artist members mentioning their own art business here things get more complex. How about members mentioning interesting art companies where they work? How about members mentioning interesting art businesses including art websites not related to them ? Are these unacceptable adverts? Actually these have happened quite often and only sometimes the mods take action. Where do we draw the line?

And mentioning websites that provide a service is even more confusing. It is rare to find good websites that are non-profit making, nor supported financially by a bigger business. It takes a lot of time and effort to continue to upkeep a good website. Google is clearly profit-making, and is a business giant. It is considered acceptable to mention it, as it provides extremely good service.

Is ISC a business? Perhaps it is not a public or private company with shareholders or partners taking out dividends from profits. I don't know. But it is a business.

I'll take a rest and let others give their comments.

[fritchie]

Merlion - These are quite reasonable observations and questions, and hopefully a post or two yesterday showed that the moderators, and more importantly, this site’s designer, owner, and overall funder, Russ RuBert, an ISC director who is very active with that group, have taken up the issue more actively, with the goal of formulating and posting specific guidelines on all these matters.

As your observations note, the matter is not a simple one, but hopefully clarity will come before long. Meanwhile, we all ask for everyone’s sympathy and patience.

[Merlion]

... and hopefully a post or two yesterday showed that the moderators, .....
Other than you, Fritchie, no other moderators have come in so far. But never mind.

It is good news that guidelines are being drawn up with the intention of being posted up. When formulating them I can think of two apparent past prejudices to avoid.

One is to avoid the bias against profit making businesses, as long as they provide good services of benefit to sculptors and the art community. And by all means, have some guidelines on what constitute good service, to avoid too much subjective judgements.

The other is to avoid a bias, sometimes unconscious, against businesses from non-Western countries. It may take more efforts to check their credibility, but we are in an age of economic globalisation, very much because of the Internet, especially the WWW and broadband.

This is an online Forum where situations can and do change. Generally we have to be transparent, be interractive, and avoid just following past 'common sense'.

[Thatch]

I was the Tube Audio moderator on a forum that was spammed on a daily basis. This as well as trolling was a major pain and ended up being a lot of work for the moderators who are only unpaid volunteers who donate their time to ensure that members have a good free place to post. Also this site is not free. Someone is paying for the address, memory etc for it to exist. The more members and topic groups the more bandwidth is required and the more it costs.
The audio site set up a forum for members to buy, sell and trade their gear. A number of different formats were tried all of which required that there be someone to moniter that forum and chase down the links etc that were posted to make sure that the post was not from a party that was posting only for profit with no benefit for the site or the members. Since the site is not free there were a number of schemes tried to not only benefit the members but to help pay for the site as well. None of these are foolproof, all require a good bit of time on someone's part and none actually benefited the site as much as hoped.
I am quite sure that the moderators have conferences about these and other issues (like my little joining of the minds with Glen) to insure that things run smoothly here. As the site grows this is going to take more and more of the moderators' time and probably will involve bringing more moderators in to keep things under control.
Keeping a lid on mercenary spamming will be an ever growing problem as there just are not that many sites devoted to sculptors for the folks out to make money to try and use. Strict control has to be kept or it will quickly get out of hand. It is in this internet world a very fine balancing act to control what is best for the group while protecting them from those who offer nothing but still try to benefit from the group.
The easiest thing for the adminstrators of this group to do is to delete all commercial posts and ban the people who post them to keep them from doing so in the future. Even this requires a good bit of time. I find the mods to be quite tolerant and hope that spammers do not force them to take actions that will curtail the posting of links of interest simply because there is a possability of business transactions.
One possabilty is to create a forum strictly for such posts mainly so that they are easier to police and keep such things out of forums where they don't belong. Just the act of tranfering a thread from one forum to another takes a few minutes. The way I see it is that the administrators are going to have to decide what is best for the group while not wasting their own time dealing with spam. Their freely given time is the main consideration here and I am stating this in case any are not aware of it.

Thatch

[Cantab]

I'm pleased that there are sensible and good moderators in place. However, I have been a little bemused by a recent incident when I responded to a sculptor who was asking for resources on anatomy. I have used an intenet site that gives lots of material for free (and you can pay for more, though most sculptors would not need to). This was deemed as advertising. There is surely an issue here: rather than advertising, I would deem this the same as offering a book title, which is OK apparently. It may even be better, in that the book publisher will benefit financially, whereas the website gets nothing directly for the sculptor's use of free material. Are we in danger of applying prejudices against web material?

[JAZ]

We are in a transitional state regarding how to deal with spam and all of your insights and opinions are useful as the moderators try to resolve this situation. None of us wants to eliminate useful information. But we're still in discussion about how best to limit the annoying stuff.
In answer to one of Merlion's concerns, of course many of us are professionals, which means that we earn money providing a service to the public. And we all are interested in discussing tools and equipment and sharing information about resources. that's part of what this forum is for - discussions to help us advance our careers and build relationships with our peers. However, none of us want to be bombarded with commercials either.
Some of the moderators, myself included, think that creating a new category on the homepage that is dedicated to resources would provide a place for advertisers of materials and services of interest to sculptors would be a step int he right direction. I also think that within that category perhaps there should be some kind of rule stating that each advertiser can put in only one ad. He or she could update it any time to keep it current and add new products or whatever, but in a way to control the size of the space. And member users of the services or materials could post whether they had good experiences with the service or material, and warnings of problems. This would be a useful portion of the site and would keep the rest of the forum free of ads for those who are not interested in them.
As far as I can see, casual discussions between members about products or equipment or the like are not troublesome at all. We are all here to learn from one another. The problems come when there are lots of advertisers coming on only for the purpose of advertizing their products, sometimes repeatedly all over the forum.
The most recent spam I deleted was a posting that had nothing whatsoever to do with sculpture. It contained a list of three links. One was to a personal injury lawyer, one was about prescription mendication and I forget what the other one was, but it was similarly unrelated. It took me only a split second to decide to get rid of that one.
The other element that is actually trickier has to do with postings that are offensive for other reasons. These are really tough to define limits on, but it seems obvious that some guidelines are needed. Most of us don't have time to waste on watching people flame each other. Only once so far do I remember someone who was posting things that were sexually objectionable. He apparently only wanted to stir things up because he never got involved in discussions about the sorts of things the rest of us are all interacting about and fortuantely he seems to have dropped out of sight. He may not have realized that there are females on this site too. I found his images disturbing because they were about subjugating women and using their bodies. He was a rarity, but it would be fine with me to eliminate that sort of poster.
I had a conversation with an officer in the New England Sculptor's Association about the subject of forum guidelines at the opening reception for a show we were both in a few months ago. She felt that until we have clear guidelines we can't justify deleting posts. I will try to find the time to talk to her about it again.
We do need to resolve what to do about spam because it is becoming a real nuisance. Your thoughts are very useful.
JAZ

[Julianna]

It's certainly a grey area.

From what I've seen, moderaters usually leave things alone unless they are unrelated to sculpture and/or posted by someone who has created an account just to post the ad. I've seen numerous posts in which members have solicited resources like stores and the responses are left alone (at least from what I can see).

Personally, I have sent people PMs in response to questions about resources when I'm not sure whether the response is an ad. For example, Rafal asked about insurance a while back and I sent him a PM with specific information. In the forum itself, I noted that I was going to do that so anyone else who needed the same type of insurance in Canada could contact me if they want the info.

Just my 2 cents.

[Daniel]

First, I would just like to say thanks to all the moderators who keep this site running. You are doing all of us a great favor. I have several times posted links to websites selling specific tools or materials in response to posted questions. Is this okay, or have I been breaking the rules? I think that the idea of creating a separate category titled resources would be very helpful. It would be great to have a section in which sculptors could, if they wish, lay out their Rolodex of relevant materials and service providers for everyone to benefit from. Young sculptors just starting out could make some big strides just by discovering what all is available to them out there. Perhaps the moderators could pick through submittals to create a permanent data base so that valuable sites don't become peppered with weight-loss pill and car insurance ads.

[fritchie]

Daniel, I think I have seen several of your mentions of goods and/or services, and they have been fine. We moderators never got around to formulating general rules - it may be too big a topic for something as flexible as this Community. My current point of view is that recommendations, at least within limits, by an individual are fine. I've even passed over, with some comment, things I believe may be a little over the limit. It's often not an easy call, and I appreciate the good things you all have to say about the MOD's. Thanks.